“Yeah. Listen Hank, you’re still seeing Melissa, aren’t you?”
“Now and then.”
He eyed me. “But you make good use of the time, I bet.”
I shrugged and nodded.
“The thing is,” he went on, “if we offer to guide these San Diegans into Orange County, we’ve got to know more than how to follow the freeway north. Anyone can figure that out. They might not want to have anything to do with us if that’s all we can offer them. But if we knew where the Japanese were going to land, and when, they’d be bound to take us along, don’t you see.”
“Maybe.”
“Sure they would! What do you mean maybe?”
“Okay, but so what?”
“Well, since you’re friends with Melissa, why don’t you ask Addison if he could help us out like that?”
“What? Oh, man—I barely know Add. And his business in Orange County is his own, no one ever asks him anything about that.”
“Well,” Steve said, looking at the ground despondently, “it sure would help us out.”
I winced to hear him sound like that. We looked at the ground for a while. Steve thwacked the book against his thigh. “Wouldn’t hurt to try, would it?” he pleaded. “If he doesn’t want to tell us something like that, he can just say so.”
“Yeah,” I said doubtfully.
“Give it a try, okay?” He still wasn’t looking me in the eye. “I really want to do something up north—fight ’em, you know?”
I wondered who he really wanted to fight, the Japanese or his pa. There he stood, looking down, frowning, hangdog, still smarting from his pa’s lording it. I hated to see him look that way.
“I’ll ask Add and see what he says,” I said, letting my reluctance sound clear in my voice.
He ignored my tone. “All right!” He gave me a brief smile. “If he tells us something, we’ll be guiding the San Diegans for sure.”
It felt odd to receive gratitude from Steve. I hadn’t seen it very often. Before, what we had done for each other was part of being friends—brothers. Before… oh, it was all changed now, changed past repair. Before when I disagreed with him, it was no big deal; we argued it out, and whatever the result, it was no challenge to his leadership of the gang. But now if I argued with him in front of the group, he wouldn’t abide it, he’d get furious. Now questioning him was questioning his leadership, and all because I had been to San Diego and he hadn’t. I was beginning to wish I’d never taken that stupid trip.
And now, to add to the mess, I was the one who was friendly with Melissa and Addison Shanks, so just when he least wanted to, Steve had to ask me to act, while he stood on the sidelines again and watched; and he had to be grateful in the bargain! And me—I couldn’t argue with him without endangering our friendship; I had to go along with his every plan, even the ones I didn’t like; and now I had to go at his request and do something he would have loved to do himself, that I had no taste for. Things were… out of my control. (Or so it felt. We lie to ourselves a lot with that one.)
All of this occurred to me in a single snap of understanding—one of those moments when a lot of things I’d seen but not comprehended came together, as bits in the pattern of someone else’s behavior, which now made sense. It was something that had happened to me more and more often that summer, but it still took me aback. I blinked and glanced at Steve again in a quick evaluation. “You’d better get down there and help your pa,” I said.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, pissed again. “Back to the pit. All right, see you soon, okay buddy?”
“See you,” I replied, and walked up to the river path. When I got home I realized I hadn’t seen a thing along my way.
14
I was out in Pa’s garden one clear evening, enjoying the still sky and its arched range of blues, when I saw the fire on the ridge. A bonfire at Tom’s place, blinking bright yellow in the dusk. I stuck my head in the door—“Off to Tom’s,” I said to Pa—and was gone. In the forest birds squeaked as I navigated my shortcut. It wasn’t really visible at night, but I knew it by the feel of the ground and the shapes of the shadows, and even without the voices of the trees to guide me I almost ran. Through certain openings in the branches the bonfire winked at me, urging me along.
Up on the ridge I ran into Rafael, Addison and Melissa, the Basilone neighbors, standing in the trail and drinking a jar of wine. Tom’s bonfires drew people. Steve and Emilia and Teddy Nicolin were already in the yard, tossing pitchy wood on the blaze. Tom led Mando and Recovery out of his house, coughing and laughing. The Simpson kids were popping around the junk in the yard, trying to scare each other. “Rebel! Deliverance! Charity! Get your asses out of there!” Recovery shouted. I grinned. It was a welcome sight, Tom’s bonfire on the hill in the evening. We greeted each other and arranged the stumps and chairs a comfortable distance from the fire, and cheered a little when John and Mrs. Nicolin showed up with a bottle of rum and a big chunk of butter wrapped in paper. By the time Carmen and Nat and the Marianis showed up the party was in full swing. No one referred to the meeting, of course, but looking around I couldn’t help thinking of it. This party was the antidote, so to speak. The idea of the gang bucking the vote made me uneasy, and I tried to forget it, but Steve kept jerking his head in Melissa’s direction, already impatient for me to work on the Shankses.
Melissa was gulling with the Mariani girls, so I took my cup of hot buttered rum and sucked on it cautiously before the fire. Watched the flame spurt out of the beads of pitch. Mando was trying to make tripods of branches over the hottest part of the fire, playing with it (he learned that from me). Fire dazzles the mind into a curious sort of peace. It commands the eye’s attention like no other sight. Yellow transparent banners, flicking up from wood and vanishing: what is that stuff, anyway? I asked Tom, but it was about the lamest of his explanations, and that’s saying a lot. What it came down to was, if things got hot enough they burned; and burning was the transformation of wood to smoke and ash by way of flame. Rafael nearly strangled on his rum laughing when Tom finished.
“Very enlightening,” I hooted, and dodged Tom’s blows. “That’s the lamest—hooo, heee—the lamest explanation you’ve ever made!”
“Wha—what about lightning?” Raphael cackled.
“What about why dolphins are warm-blooded?” Steve nodded. Tom waved us off like mosquitoes and went for more rum, and we settled down to giggling.
But Tom knew why fire so captured the eye and mind, or so it seemed to me. One time I had ventured that fire made a good image of the mind—thoughts flickering like flames, eventually exhausting the wood of our flesh. Tom had nodded but said no, it was the other way around. The mind, he said, was a good image of fire—at least in this respect: for millions of years, humans had lived even more humbly than we did. Right on the edge of existence, for literally millions of years. He swore to that length of time, and made me try to imagine that many generations, which of course I couldn’t. I mean, think about it. Anyway, back at the beginning fire only appeared to humans as lightning and forest infernos, and they scorched a path from the eye to the brain. “Then when Prometheus gave us control of fire—” Tom said.
“Who’s this Prometheus?”
“Prometheus is the name for the part of our brains that contains the knowledge of fire. The brain has growths like tubers, or boles on a tree, where knowledge of certain subjects accumulate. As the sight of fire caused this particular bole to evolve it got bigger, until it was named Prometheus and the human animal was in control of fire.” So, he went on, for generation after generation to a number beyond counting men had sat around fires and watched them. To these ice-bitten ancestors fire meant warmth; to them, who bolted the flesh of smaller creatures every third day or so, it meant food. Between the eye and Prometheus grew a path of nerves like a freeway, and fire became a sight to turn the head and make one rapt. In the last century of the old time, civilized humanity had lost its dependence on simple fires, but that was no more than a blink of the eye in the span of human time; and now the blink was over, and we stared at fires hypnotized again.